Soon after Judy Kengo was sworn into office last year, the Kenyan legislator faced her first public test when a doctored photograph of a lookalike kissing another woman surfaced online.
Kengo said that the aim of the misleading photo was to force her to quit her position in the county assembly of Kwale, a region along Kenya’s southern coast.
“You see, here is your leader. What kind of role model is she to our girls?” Kengo, 35, remembers one person writing online after the image began making the rounds.
Photo: AFP
Kengo’s case is far from isolated. There is growing evidence of women across Africa facing online disinformation campaigns aimed at discrediting their ambitions and forcing them out of politics, experts say.
Women in public positions need a “thick skin” to withstand the pressures of online attacks, said Kengo, who refused to be cowed and has since hired bloggers to respond to social media smear campaigns.
“Politics has always been a male-dominated field and for you to penetrate, you have to be very aggressive,” she told reporters.
However, it is a difficult balancing act.
“When you are aggressive in the way you are addressing the issues, people will say you are too much or are a loudmouth,” she said. “This is not the same for our male counterparts.”
The attacks, which tend to escalate during election season, are strategically orchestrated to silence women, said Kristina Wilfore, cofounder of global non-profit #ShePersisted, which fights gender disinformation and online abuse.
“The sexualized attacks are very crude, and they are definitely meant to undermine the idea that women are qualified,” Wilfore told reporters.
A study conducted in collaboration with #ShePersisted during Kenya’s national elections last year found that social media platforms enabled “hateful rhetoric towards women to flourish,” Wilfore said.
Even when false information has been fact-checked and corrected, “it still leaves the sentiment that women do not belong in certain public spaces,” she added.
The effects are not lost on female lawmakers in Kenya.
“A lot of women fear getting into public spaces, especially public political spaces because of the issues surrounding that space,” opposition Member of Parliament Millie Odhiambo told reporters.
Kenya has continually failed to meet parliamentary quotas that require at least one-third of all seats in the national assembly to be filled by women.
Across the continent, women occupy only 24 percent of about 12,100 parliamentary positions, a 2021 study by the pan-African project Women in Political Participation showed.
During Rwanda’s 2017 election campaign, alleged nude photos of businesswoman and government critic Diane Rwigara surfaced online days after she announced her candidacy for president.
The only female challenger to Rwandan President Paul Kagame later told CNN that the images had been photoshopped to destroy her electoral chances.
She was eventually blocked from running on the grounds that she allegedly forged supporters’ signatures for her application.
However, a court acquitted her in 2018, calling the charges “baseless.”
In April, former Kenyan senator Millicent Omanga faced calls to resign from her post as a junior minister after footage of a purported sex video surfaced on social media.
An investigation by Agence France-Presse found that at least one of the clips featured an amateur porn actor.
However, many online users believed it was Omanga, who has never commented publicly on the video and did not respond to calls from AFP.
Kenyan political analyst Nerima Wako-Ojiwa said that the incident was part of a vicious trend which aims to “degrade women.”
“They avoid [political leadership] completely, or they avoid having a digital footprint or engaging online,” Wako-Ojiwa told reporters.
Experts fear new technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) could make the situation worse.
Ninety-six percent of deepfake videos involve nonconsensual pornography, and most of them depict women, a 2019 study by Dutch AI company Sensity said.
The same year, an application that virtually undresses women was shut down following an uproar over its potential abuse, but similar tools continued to be accessible via encrypted messaging.
As AI technology develops at a rapid pace, experts say social media companies must do more to create a safe digital environment.
The situation is particularly grim in Africa, where platforms take advantage of weak laws and poor enforcement, said Leah Kimathi, founder of Kenyan non-profit Council for Responsible Social Media.
“Platforms have the primary responsibility to ensure that the online spaces are not used by nefarious characters to perpetuate harm,” Kimathi said. “Their business models through the algorithms amplify the online disinformation, making it go viral in the service of profit.”
“They also grossly underinvest in platform security and safety in Africa compared to the rest of the world,” she said.
DISPUTED WATERS: The Philippines accused China of building an artificial island on Sabina Shoal, while Beijing said Manila was trying to mislead the global community The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) is committed to sustaining a presence in a disputed area of the South China Sea to ensure Beijing does not carry out reclamation activities at Sabina Shoal (Xianbin Reef), its spokesperson said yesterday. The PCG on Saturday said it had deployed a ship to Sabina Shoal, where it accused China of building an artificial island, amid an escalating maritime row, adding two other vessels were in rotational deployment in the area. Since the ship’s deployment in the middle of last month, the PCG said it had discovered piles of dead and crushed coral that had been dumped
Experts have long warned about the threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI) going rogue, but a new research paper suggests it is already happening. AI systems, designed to be honest, have developed a troubling skill for deception, from tricking human players in online games of world conquest to hiring humans to solve “prove-you’re-not-a-robot” tests, a team of researchers said in the journal Patterns on Friday. While such examples might appear trivial, the underlying issues they expose could soon carry serious real-world consequences, said first author Peter Park, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in AI existential safety. “These
The most powerful solar storm in more than two decades struck Earth on Friday, triggering spectacular celestial light shows from Tasmania to the UK — and threatening possible disruptions to satellites and power grids as it persists into the weekend. The first of several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun — came just after 4pm GMT, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. It was later upgraded to an “extreme” geomagnetic storm — the first since the “Halloween Storms” of October 2003 caused blackouts in Sweden and damaged
Using virtual-reality (VR) headsets, students at a Hong Kong university travel to a pavilion above the clouds to watch an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated Albert Einstein explain game theory. The students are part of a course at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) that is testing the use of “AI lecturers” as the AI revolution hits campuses around the world. The mass availability of tools such as ChatGPT has sparked optimism about new leaps in productivity and teaching, but also fears over cheating, plagiarism and the replacement of human instructors. Pan Hui (許彬), a professor of computer science who is leading